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Postings from April 2010
On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Andy Dougherty <doughera@lafayette.edu> wrote: > On Thu, 8 Apr 2010, Nicholas Clark wrote: > >> On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 10:24:39PM +0100, Ben Morrow wrote: >> > Quoth nick@ccl4.org (Nicholas Clark): >> > > >> > > So I can't see how the whole tree can be done this way. Given that DynaLoader >> > > needs XS compilation, and DynaLoader.o needs to be built to build perl, >> > >> > Is there a good reason for this? That is, is there some reason dl_*.c >> > can't just be included in the normal build, rather than an extension? We >> > would still need an ext/DynaLoader/Makefile.PL to do the preprocessing >> > on DynaLoader_pm.PL, but it could become a nonxs module. >> >> Good question, and one I'd not thought of. >> I don't know, but I'm guessing that it's this way because >> >> a: it always was this way >> b: it was historically assumed that it's easier to write XS than to write >> equivalent C code > > It's more that it organically grew that way and never changed. > > Originally, there was no dynamic loading of any sort. Larry wrote the > first dlopen()-based dynaloader (perl5alpha6 or so, I think). Others soon > contributed versions for other operating systems (e.g. HP/UX, NeXT, etc.). > Since dynamic loading wouldn't work everywhere, it was natural to think > of it as an "extension", and not include it in the normal build. > Certainly that's how I thought of it. That matches my recall pretty closely. ISTR that dynamic loading was new-ish on some of the systems where Perl built, let alone to Perl itself, and it wasn't as accepted as it is now that dynamic extensions were a Good Thing for production use, as opposed to static linking a la sybperl and friends for at least frequently-used extensions. I remember a lot more discussion of baking in extensions during the Perl build, and of MakeMaker's ability to build a new static perl, the corollary being that one might not need the DynaLoader. -- Regards, Charles Bailey Lists: bailey _dot_ charles _at_ gmail _dot_ com Other: bailey _at_ newman _dot_ upenn _dot_ eduThread Previous | Thread Next